Pink Purse Girl.

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

Through free verse and prose poems, Helwig effectively examines emptiness in relationships between family members and between lovers (both heterosexual and homosexual) as well as in verbal communication, in written expression, and in visual representation. She uses a variety of settings (European, North American, urban, and rural) and languages (English, French, Polish, Italian, Latin, and Yiddish) to demonstrate the endemic nature of human experience to look for love and search for meaning but come up empty.

Two poems have the word empty in their titles: “The heart is empty so far” and “Mrs. Rosen, your husband is empty of love.” The latter also uses the title as its final line. In “Another kind of wedding,” Helwig’s speaker ends the poem by saying, “then he … let me see his great big need / asked for love, asked for tenderness / that empty gaping thing.” “Days of nothing” drives home this theme of emptiness with its emphasis on zeroes, hollowness, nothingness, the letter o, and the donut. This emptiness in relationships and religion spills over into emptiness of expression. Helwig’s speaker in “Love songs of the 60s” laments, “When you’re out of love, you’re out of words for love / that word, that word / that spoonful.” Helwig underscores her speakers’ experiences of isolation, dislocation, fragmentation, and arbitrariness with foreign settings, foreign languages, and new configurations of familiar words with poem titles such as “Under stand” and “Friend ship.” The latter also, ironically, contains a character who serves as the title of this collection. Pink Purse Girl with matching pumps, full purse, and poetry award is the antithesis of Helwig’s speakers.

Helwig provides no relief from the pain of all this relational, religious, and artistic emptiness except through the pleasure of filling up with junk food—the chocolate bar in “Music, a food for love” and the Dairy Queen sundae in “A good poem is better than ten novels”—and the sight of bare breasts in “A hooker flashes her breasts on Jarvis as we drive home from the poetry workshop.”